alt Hacker NewsThings we don't have to worry about anymore:
10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...
Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up
Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!
Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.
Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.
Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.
Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...
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And you don't have to compulsively save anymore! Autosave is everywhere!
Win 98 was 32 bit but half-an OS, NT and GNU/Linux were far better.
- Terrible streaming.
WMA files too.
> Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!
This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)
Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.
Google adds cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feeds private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and sells data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.
Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.